“Listen,” he said when they arrived, “the restaurant opens on Monday and it’s going to be batshit crazy having the whole operation outside. I suggest you get all your loose ends tied up because come Monday, it will be all hands on deck.”

Zoe nodded, waved goodbye and pushed open the front door to her building.

Later, while staring out her window at the empty bench in the park and still determined to save a life, Zoe left a series of messages for Detective Williams. Each subsequent voicemail sounded more anxious and convoluted.

On the first one, Zoe reported the sighting that morning of the masked woman in the park. Her second message warned the detectives that they were running out of time. Her third voicemail was nonsensical, worried and teary. When several hours passed with no response, she called Detective Kim and left two messages. Frustrated, at five o’clock, Zoe called Detective Williams a fourth time.

“It’s me again, Zoe Brandt. I wanted to find out if there was any possibility of you locating that man before something happens to him,” she said as she cleared her throat and took a sip of her bourbon. “We’ve got to stop this.” With her voice cracking, she started to cry. “I can’t stop thinking about him and I don’t know how I can live with myself if I just let him die. Maybe it’s still not too late.”

In hot pursuit of the West Side Strangler, the detectives were on their way to meet a postal inspector and go over mail routes and carriers. Zoe Brandt’s nonsensical murder mystery was no longer on their radar.

“She’s relentless, I’ll give her that,” said Daryl shaking his head as he put his phone back in his breast pocket and turned the car onto 34th Street. “I just got my fourth message from Zoe Brandt.”

“She’s called me twice,” said Heather. “She should have been a detective. Tenacious is an understatement. You do know she’s got a screw loose.”

“That thought crossed my mind several hundred times but I still think she’s telling the truth.”

“Maybe she just thinks it’s the truth,” said Heather. “We can’t get distracted by the Zoe Brandts of the world.”

“I’m on the same page,” said Daryl as they pulled abruptly into a parking spot. Leaping out of the car the two detectives walked briskly into a USPS building.

42

On the couch in her living room that evening, Zoe FaceTimed with Sean.

“It’s 7:15,” she said, “the man is probably already dead. We completely failed. We’re the world’s worst detectives.”

“Look at it this way, if someone turns up dead today or tomorrow, the cops will know his wife was behind it,” said Sean.